Perhaps the most common fi nding in the emerging literature on the economics of sexual orientation is that gay men in the United States (defi ned in a variety of ways across independent data sources) earn signifi cantly less than their heterosexual male counterparts (Badgett 1995; Allegretto and Arthur 2001; Black et al. 2003; Blandford 2003; Carpenter 2005b and others). Moreover, numerous studies have shown that married men enjoy a large and robust earnings premium over their unmarried male counterparts (Korenman and Neumark 1991 and others). This paper considers the possibility that these phenomena may be related. Specifi cally, I explore whether a preference for heterosexual workers by employers might contribute both to a wage premium for heterosexual married men and a wage penalty for gay men. In doing so, I build on the work of Blandford (2003), who fi rst made a similar argument by comparing the economic penalties for “open” (unmarried) and “masked” (married) gay individuals. I address the question in a different methodological fashion, however, by directly examining relevant variation in the returns to marriage.